As U.S. steps up investigation, Iran denies assisting Al Qaeda

July 21, 2004|By John Crewdson, Tribune senior correspondent.

WASHINGTON — Federal intelligence agencies are following President Bush's directive to search for hints of Iranian involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, even as the Iranian government on Tuesday labeled such suggestions "ridiculous" and reiterated its official opposition to Al Qaeda.

The Bush administration's abrupt shift of focus from Iraq to its neighboring foe, Iran, came as an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 hijacking plot put the final touches on a roughly 600-page report expected to outline longstanding links between the Iranian government and terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda and Hezbollah.

FOR THE RECORD - This story contains corrected material, published July 24, 2004.

"We're digging into the facts to determine" if there was an Iranian connection to Sept. 11, Bush told reporters this week, adding that he had "long expressed my concerns about Iran. After all, it's a totalitarian society where free people are not allowed to exercise their rights as human beings."

Iran has sponsored devastating terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, served as a refuge for senior leaders of Al Qaeda and has a burgeoning nuclear research program that is believed to be on the verge of developing an atomic weapon--all offenses of which the administration at one time suspected Iraq.

While Washington has focused extensively on Iraq, evidence linking Iran to Al Qaeda has continued to accumulate.

Virtually from the moment of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the White House began searching for substantive links between Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, according to public accounts by several past and present administration officials.

That search has proved mostly fruitless.

In a television interview, Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey and chairman of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, said his panel's inquiry had found that "there were a lot more active contacts, frankly, with Iran and with Pakistan than there were with Iraq."

Earlier this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting a separate investigation of the administration's rationale for launching the war against Iraq, reported finding "no credible information" that Iraq possessed "foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other Al Qaeda strike."

The independent Sept. 11 commission's report, scheduled for release Thursday, is likely to raise fresh questions about whether the administration's campaign to tie Baghdad to bin Laden might have been better focused linking him to Tehran.

Iran's sponsorship of terrorism, including attacks aimed at the U.S., is beyond dispute. Intelligence analysts are virtually unanimous in attributing the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the 1996 attack that killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia to Iranian-funded terrorist operatives.

In the hours after Sept. 11, Bush declared war not just on Al Qaeda, but on governments that support it and other terrorist organizations. The administration, however, does not appear to have explored Iran's known and potential Al Qaeda connections with the same fervor that has marked its search for links between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

A frequent explanation for not pushing the Iranian connection harder is the administration's hope that Iran's radical Islamic government will eventually collapse from the inside, under pressure from a populace increasingly disillusioned with the stark fundamentalist doctrine espoused by the mullahs who have ruled Iran since the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

While the administration watches for signs of change in Tehran, reports of connections between Iran and Al Qaeda have persisted, and in some cases evidence has even been made public by the U.S. government.

According to a 4-year-old federal warrant issued in an Al Qaeda-related case in New York, during the mid-1990s a senior Al Qaeda figure, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, negotiated an agreement among Al Qaeda, a Sudanese group and "elements within the Government of Iran" to plan joint attacks against the U.S. and Israel.

Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who spent several years in the Middle East, says he knows of "incontrovertible evidence" of a 1996 meeting in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, between bin Laden and a representative of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS.

Earlier this year, a former MOIS officer, Hamid Reza Zakeri, testifying in a Sept. 11 conspiracy trial in Hamburg, Germany, said he had assisted with security for two meetings in early 2001 between senior Iranian officials and their Al Qaeda counterparts.

Zakeri, who U.S. and German intelligence agencies say has a mixed record for reliability, provided the court and the German federal police with an account of a January 2001 meeting Zakeri said was attended by bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Al Qaeda leader's eldest son, Saad bin Laden. Zakeri also told of a second meeting in May 2001 attended by Saad bin Laden and Iranian officials.